Gamer Girls

I’m not watching this. Not for one fucking second. “Joey C” is on here. That guy who’s so desperate for attention that he dresses like a woman.

But I’m reminded of some guy, at the end of my martial arts experience, talking about Brandon Lee. It was some guy in his 30s or 40s. There were some real weirdos doing martial arts in their 30s and 40s when I was a kid. And this guy…mistakenly called some kid Bruce and somebody corrected him and said that his name is Brandon and then this guy said something like, “Well, Bruce had Brandon”.

Brandon Lee had died a year or two previously.

Anyway, I started taking tae kwon do in probably…the fifth grade? Maybe fourth grade. I was inspired by The Karate Kid, a movie that I don’t even think that I had seen.

I went to some place near my home. I’d walk there, in my uniform, which even at the time I found embarrassing.

Originally, I went with some hillbilly neighbour but he quickly lost interest. He only stuck with it for a month or two. But I kept going.

I was one of the older people in the class but…I couldn’t have been older than in the fifth grade because I know by the sixth grade, I was already a pro. How old are you in the fifth grade? Ten? I find it hard to believe that I was one of the older students at 10 but I was.

Anyway, I’d go there. The instructor was a Mexican guy. Oddly, one of the first Mexican guys I knew. Now, you’d go to that town and it’s mostly Mexicans but at the time, the town was overwhelmingly white.

He actually knew about tae kwon do and I would come to learn, from later going to other schools, that this is rare.

It wasn’t some McDojo where they push belts and belt tests and fees for belt tests. He rarely had belt tests. Two years went by and nobody had a belt test. In these McDojos, you can go all the way to black belt in two years. And he didn’t charge for any tests or the belts. This might explain why the tests were so infrequent. He didn’t have money. He wasn’t making money from this place and he worked full time in an industrial job.

But it wasn’t about belts. It was about learning how to do tae kwon do. And he knew the correct form. He knew the movements. And we would go in and practice this. He taught the class. It wasn’t some bullshit like I’d see elsewhere where he would just open the class and then some weird middle aged “student” would take over. This guy gave the lessons.

I was never good at any sport or any physical activity but tae kwon do was where I was at. I was limber, I was tall, I was quick. It was not long before I was kicking the shit out of everyone.

There was only one time when I had to put my skills to use on the streets. I’m sure that I told this story here before. It was the sixth grade. I was in the playground and somebody threw a football at some kid’s face. I was then blamed for it. Anyone with a brain would know that I didn’t do it. I literally never threw a football in my life at that point. I didn’t fucking play football during recess. I never did any of that shit. But I got blamed for it, almost certainly by the guy who actually threw the football.

So this kid who got hit is looking at his glasses and indicating that they might be broken. This kid is the biggest nerd in the school. I tell him that I did not throw the fucking football but he doesn’t believe me. So a crowd forms as this kid starts lightly punching my arm. And I’m saying “ow, ow, ow” sarcastically as he’s doing this. The mob of people are all cheering for this kid, sarcastically. The only person cheering for me is my friend.

As this kid continues to punch my arm, I realise that he’s not going to stop. So as he goes to punch me again, I shift back, grabs him by the wrist, twist his arm, and with my other hand, I punch him in the stomach. All in one swift movement. I didn’t hit him particularly hard but he acted like I broke his ribs. Then everybody scattered and the fight was over.

Looking back, I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a good playground fight. They happened sem-regularly but I can only remember one and it sucked. It was between two pretty fat guys. One of the guys got into a lot of fights because people would pick on him. I guess that this guy got sick of it so he started swinging at this other kid. Really full force haymaker punches. And he missed every fucking time. This other fat kid just danced around and after every missed punch, he would slap the kid around a little. Literally just open hand little slaps. It was comical. But he was able to win the fight like that and nobody got hurt. So that’s good.

So tae kwon do. I did it for years at this Mexican guy’s place. Then in the eighth or ninth grade, he closed. Just one day, it wasn’t open. I still kept going for a while to check and then one day I saw him in there so I went in. He told me that he couldn’t afford to keep the place open any more. I was a little tearful, which makes me think I was younger than I think I was. Could I really have been in high school and tearing up over this? Maybe. And then he suggested that I join some other tae kwon do place that had opened a couple of years earlier and was the driving force for this school shutting down.

So I went there and it was fucking dogshit. Total conman running the place. McDojo all the way. Belts adorned the walls of all colours of the rainbow. It was me and some six year old in some free “trial class”. And I remember this guy saying, “Okay, who has the magnet in their pocket?” It was some stupid “joke” about how we were standing too close to each other.

He also had a questionaire that we had to fill out. Some bullshit. “What do you want to be when you grow up” and shit like this. Hey. Guy. I’m here for tae kwon do, not the bullshit. Can you just teach some tae kwon do?

He also charged ridiculous amount of money.

He didn’t know shit and he was a total fraud so I told my mother that I didn’t want to go.

But later, I’m thinking in the 10th grade, I did end up taking classes from that guy, briefly. By this time, he had moved to a small McDojo, in a little…what do you call it…the word “mall” is in the term but it’s just like three or four stores.

His students were shit. He was shit. And I ran roughshod over everyone. He hated it. He hated it because it exposed how little this guy knew about tae kwon do and consequently how ill-prepared his students were.

Everything I did was better than everyone else. Those people couldn’t do forms, they didn’t know how to throw a proper kick, they couldn’t do shit. To give a small but important example, when doing forms (which are a series of block and punches, mostly…I think it’s called “kata” in karate, I don’t know the Korean term) they would just lumber along. But I was taught to slide your feet together and then out. So you move your feet together and then out in a graceful motion as you walk. But these clowns just stomped around. And when this joke of an instructor saw me doing that, he said, “Oh yeah. Slide your feet together when you take a step.”

I had to fucking show him this. He didn’t know it.

I also beat the fuck out of him. We would spar. He was shit. He’s getting his ass kicked by a 10th grader.

I was there for maybe six months. Maybe not even that long. I fucking hated it. I hated that guy. Fuck that conman.

I also went to the guy who taught this guy, and now that I think of it, maybe I went to this guy’s instructor before I went to this guy. I can’t quite remember the order now.

But the guy who taught this conman was a total conman himself. But at least this guy knew tae kwon do. It was an old Korean guy. This conman instructor was a white guy.

So anyway, this Korean guy was really good. On the rare ocassions when he would demonstrate a kick or something, it was clear that he knew the technique. The problem is, this lazy piece of shit didn’t teach anything. He’d open the class and then sit in his office and jack off while some 17 year old brown belt “teaches” us.

I went there originally with some little kid who my sister used to babysit for and his mother. His mother took tae kwon do as a kid and now she was one of those weirdos doing it as an adult. They didn’t last long, though. Maybe two or three months. And that instructor basically let her run the class. This woman who just started. I mean, she took tae kwon do as a kid and got a black belt but this was years ago. And in the class, she was a white belt because this guy didn’t recognise belts attained elsewhere, not even black belts. So you had this white belt woman, who only started recently, teaching this class of like 8th to 12th graders, with a few weird adults mixed in.

Once again, I beat the fuck out of everyone. These people were never taught anything. And it was all the more embarassing because I was a white belt and I was kicking the shit out of their black belts.

The instructor even told me, “You’re better than the others.” He said this in private to me and this wasn’t something that he was saying to everyone to boost their self-esteem or anything. He was genuine. I was genuinely better than everyone. I had been doing this for like seven years at this point. And I was taught by a guy who actually knew what the fuck he was doing. That Mexican guy.

Looking back, there were a lot of things I didn’t like about that Mexican guy. He could be a dick. And he was teaching us aikido or something on some days because he was taking aikido classes. So it’s like rolls and shit. Tumbling bullshit. I don’t want to do this. This isn’t what I signed up for. And this guy isn’t even qualified to teach this. I don’t think that he was a black belt or whatever the ranking system is.

One guy actually complained. He said that he comes here to learn tae kwon do, not anything else. And this guy was encouraged by his parents to complain about it.

So the next day, the instructor comes out and compares his school to college. “When you go to college, you don’t just take classes in your major. You also have to take classes in foreign language, and history, and art, and…” Yeah. And that sucks dick too. Why copy the bullshit parts of college?

For a month, in like the 10th grade, I also went to some other place but they shut down shortly after they opened because the instructor got injured or something.

Anyway, then there was the final place that I went to. By this point, I had exhausted all of the tae kwon do schools in like a 20 mile radius. So I went to a karate school. Another conman who didn’t know shit. It was some creepy old white guy. I was probably in the 11th grade.

He was dismissive of tae kwon do. He didn’t like that I had long hair. And he didn’t like that I was better than everyone. The only saving grace is that he never had any sparring in class so that it would become demonstrably clear how much better I was than everybody else.

There was some like 8th or 9th grade girls in the class who he would make creepy comments to. There was a girl handing out birthday invitations to the other girls and this guy asked if he was invited and she said, “You can come if you want” and he declined. Then there was a mark on her wrist one day, or something, and he asked if it was from handcuffs. I don’t remember the exact context but it was definitely a sexual comment and she was offended by it and stopped coming to lessons not long after.

This is also the guy who kept punching my balls over and over just to confirm that I wasn’t wearing a cup. I told that story before. He was clearly getting off on it.

There was another time where we had to take our shirts off. This instructor wasn’t even there, it was some middle aged guy who always taught the class anyway. But he tells us to take our shirts off since there weren’t any girls there. He even commented how uncomfortable I looked.

Guy…I am not there to take my fucking shirt off and do your fucking nonsense. It was some complete bullshit about seeing how your muscles move when you do particular moves. And I had absolutely no musculature and didn’t want to fucking be there, as a 16 year old, with my shirt off, with a bunch of a fucking creeps. Just teach us the fucking moves. These people are shit. Do you want me to take over? They don’t know anything.

I quit that place after three or six months too. It was over that “osu” shit where I failed my impromtu yellow belt test because I didn’t give a shit about belts. I told this story before too, presumably in the same post as the other one.

So I was taking martial from…the 4th or 5th grade to…maybe the 9th grade with that Mexican guy and then sporadically until the 11th grade. And then I quit. I ran out of places to go to. I still wanted to do it but these places all sucked dick and I knew it. Only that Mexican guy knew what he was doing.

It was a good experience, though. It was the one sport-type thing that I did that I was good at. So it was good for self-esteem and balance and maybe even some discipline.

This was basically me at every one of these McDojos that I went to, except I kept my gi on: